| ABIT AI7 |
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The board layout is very good, everything is where you would expect it to be…other than the floppy connector. As the above picture shows the floppy connector is at the bottom of the board. Because of the design of most cases (most that I’ve used anyway) it made life a little awkward to work the cable to the drive in a tidy way. The Fan on the northbridge is a 5000rpm model and is reasonably good at cooling whilst remaining quiet. You will also notice that the CPU socket is turned 45degrees from the position you would expect. This is most likely to improve power flow and therefore should enhance overclocking.
The BIOS of the AI7 is as feature packed as you could wish, everything that you could expect is included. There is easy access to overclocking and voltage settings and your new settings can be applied on the fly by pressing F8 (that’s right, no restart required). The BIOS also includes ABIT’s new Game Accelerator technology. The idea behind this is that your memory performance should receive a boost when game accelerator is enabled. Having played around with the on the fly bios changes and Game Accelerator I found the results to be disappointing. The on the fly changes usually resulted in display issues within BIOS which required a restart to recover from. As for game accelerator technology, I found that with my RAM (Twinmos 2x256mb DDR400 dual channel kit) enabling all the settings resulted in more frequent crashes when really pushing the system.
Test System: Software: The test system was built from scratch, a format of the hard drive was performed (NTFS) and then Windows XP was installed. Following the completion of the install the N-force, Hyperion or Intel Chipset drivers were installed. The only updates applied were SP1a and Direct X 9.0b. Following a reboot the Detonator 53.03 drivers were installed. Next the benchmarking tools were installed and finally the hard drive was de-fragmented. For all tests the ATI and Nvidia drivers were set to best image quality. Good Benchmarking Practice:
Comparison Systems: Amd Athlon 64 FX-51 (2249Mhz) Amd Athlon 64 3200+ (2000mhz) Amd Opteron 146 (2050mhz) AMD Athlon XP 3200+ (2.25ghz) The following benchmark results were also included in our AFX review so you may wish to skip to the uguru section.
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